Okay so the question isn’t “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” but at least I have an answer….

Speaking of which, a colleague and I were messing around one lunchtime on Google, giggling at the google predictive search results (“why is a raven like a writing desk?” popped up the first suggestion when I typed in “why”). Naturally, this got me to thinking about the top searches on Google so after a quick search (on Google), I got to Google Insight.

The answer? Not very interesting. It’s not ‘Porn’ or ‘Brittenaey Spears’ (yes I know I spelt that wrong) like it was in the late 90s and early 2000s. No, the rather unexciting ‘facebook’ tops the list, followed far behind by youtube, bbc, hotmail, ebay…

…wait a minute. People are actually searching for these terms? Presumably they are looking for these websites, why else would you be searching for facebook or hotmail? Youtube or BBC I can understand if you were looking for a particular clip on YouTube or news story on BBC, but facebook? Hotmail? Ebay? And look at the rising searches! Twitter! Even ‘Facebook login’!

This, to me, points to a worrying trend of computer illiteracy. The government are still pushing the digital age and I do not deny at all that they have gotten far. When I first arrived in the UK in 1998 my family was one of the few that I knew that had a computer in their house, let alone the internet! This graph shows the meteoric rise of home computers and internet useage, and for that I appluad what efforts the government made to aid that along (although I will also say that a lot of it will also have to do with the world economy and technology getting cheaper).

However our earlier data makes it clear that computer literacy didn’t come along with home computers and the internet. A lot of people are turning on their computers, loading up Internet Explorer, and searching for facebook or ‘facebook login’ to get to their favourite social networking site. This shows a very limited knowledge of how computers work and what can be achieved by them. People don’t even seem to know enough about computers that they can type in ‘www.facebook.com’ or ‘www.hotmail.com’ into their address bar to get them to the website they want!

I can understand this. I used to do this when I first started using the internet. I’d load up the browser, type ‘rocketmail‘ into webcrawler, and find my mail that way. When I needed to search for something else, I’d close the window down and open it again just so I could get my search engine up again! But that lasted all of 2 days, until I figured out how to use web addresses and I found other search engines that were not my default homepage.

The problem I think we have today that is demonstrated in the Google Insight results is that people are learning ‘routes’ to get what they want out of their computer. “To get to facebook I have to open internet explorer and find it in google” (even this doesn’t work everytime, this post had to insert a message in bold to tell Google visitors that it wasn’t a facebook login page! Funny right now, yes. But what about the potential for phishing?). “To get to my e-mail I need to search for it in Google”. So yes, we have a lot of people on computers nowadays, and they are doing things on them, but are they really computer literate?

Suppose you moved to a big city. Immediately you figure out how to get to your local cornershop, supermarket and postoffice, how to get to work, and possibly one or two other things like how to get to your local pub. But you don’t stop there, or at least you shouldn’t. Through exploring and visiting new places all the time, you eventually build up a map in your head of your new city, and maps are helpful just to find out where you are and where you’re going.

Computer literacy is like that map. Too many people are just travelling to work (firing up Word) and maybe to their local pub (going to Facebook), but not anywhere else. They’re missing out on all the museums, the parks, the riverside walks, the great concert venues and architectural wonders of their new city, because they never try to go anywhere new. The worse thing is that maybe they’d like to visit these places, but they’re too scared to venture out, in case they get lost.

We need to encourage computer illiterate people to spend more time on their computers, to find out what they can do with their computers, and especially what their computers can do for them. They need to start building a map in their head, to not be scared of installing and using new programs or even learn to use existing programs to their full extent, to play around, to even try their hand at programming, if it can help them create something or save them time.

People are constantly scared of ‘breaking’ their computers through experimentation – I never managed it at the age of 6 and believe me it’s gotten a lot of harder since then. We need to convince them of this.

I know people who work with computers everyday, who do a myriad of things with computers including working on Word and Excel documents, chatting to their friends on Skype, even editing webpages on Dreamweaver, that don’t have that map in their head, and instead only their remembered routes. As someone who knows how much computers can help us speed up everyday mundane tasks, entertain us, and aid in creative processes, this frustrates me greatly.

How do we get computer literacy into the lives of the people around us? It is both a give and take. As computer literates we need to help and explain, and hopefully the people we are helping will listen.

I am always willing to help people who come to me for help with their computer, and as I help I always make sure they understand exactly what their issue is and how I am fixing it, and how they can do it in the future. Helping someone on their computer without an explanation is like meeting someone who has no knowledge of their city, blindfolding them, and taking them to a place they wanted to go to, and taking off the blindfold. You may have taken them there, but what happens if they want to go again?

Nice metaphor But what if people don’t want to learn more than their remembered route? I’ve tried every possible approach with my mother: The pedagogic approach (“So which menu item do you think you should use to *open* a *file*?”), the by-analogy approach (“Okay, you know how to open a file in Word, how do you think you’ll open a PDF?”), and, yes, explaining everything from fundamental principles (“Each file is stored on your hard disk, which is organised in directories, and you can use the Explorer to look at all the files, no matter which type…”). What do you think she still does? That’s right, remembered routes.

I think the problem (besides computer usability, which is a whole other topic) is one of attitude and willingness to invest time. You need to have the right attitude (i.e. be curious about what different things do, and not be scared of breaking things) and you need to invest a certain amount of time up-front just exploring the different options. If you don’t do that, then you’ll never get beyond the remembered routes phase, no matter how many helpful people try to explain how things work to you.

PS: I often use Google to find websites I haven’t bookmarked. Not because I can’t remember http://www.twitter.com, but simply because I use the Google search bar more often than the address bar, so I’ll go there first without thinking.

Your post was very interesting, especially the analogy. I was expecting it to be different! I have been using maps more than usual lately and what they do for me is exactly what you suggested: they show you the shortest route to where you want to go, they provide the overall picture for you to realise that the route you have been walking to get to place X actually makes very little sense. Computer literacy allows you to know the safest, shortest route to getting your computer doing what you need to do.
But you wouldn’t find the museum, the hidden church and the pretty canal-side walk if you used maps! How often do you find a really nice place by wandering about your neighbourhood with only a vague idea of where you want to get? Learning IT skills for me is generally like that. Ok, I have had some formal training at school (by a teacher who did Ctrl-X for Delete), but most of it I have picked up like most people do – by doing. And I think that for learning beyond your basic needs that’s the best way. Not only you never really retain information about actions that you don’t then usually do (MS Word and macros! What’s that about), so a lot of the learning falls on deaf ears, but most of the “cool” things I learnt I have found by randomly looking at drop down menus while trying to find something else.
What is worrying is the lack of awareness about other issues, especially when people browse the net etc. So instead of maps, perhaps we need big danger signs, that explain what people need to look out for. The level of computer literacy needs to be whatever necessary to understand these dangers. If they keep doing Ctrl-X for Delete, that’s okay.

The ReadWriteWeb fiasco really underlines the illiteracy that you’re discussing. But that said, if I want to login to Facebook then why shouldn’t I be able to type “facebook login” into a browser and expect it to work? Sure enough, if I do that in Chrome right now it does indeed do the Right Thing and show me the URL for the Facebook login page.

On a similar vein I find it interesting that more and more adverts now have “Search for xyz” on them rather than a URL. Ultimately people don’t really want to ‘go to a webpage at this URL’, they just want to ‘go to what I want’. This behaviour also manifests itself in the Windows Vista/7 start menu where you just type what you want and Windows works it out.

But back to your point, when I was a kid I would endlessly experiment with my PC to learn how it worked, and install loads of different programs to work out which was best. But as I get older I have less-and-less time to do this and would rather just get on with the task at hand. Even generally I’m more reluctant to muck about with new OS’s etc. on my PC because it is now an essential tool and I can’t afford to have it not working. This is especially true of my Android phone where I have put off upgrading the firmware because I need to re-install everything afterwards and I just can’t afford any downtime with my phone.

Nevertheless, the experience that I gained mucking around as a kid has stayed with me and I think youth is an ideal (and possibly the only) time to experiment with computers. I’m not sure what ICT teaching is like these days but I only hope that schools are encouraging this experimentation and not stifling it by sending kids down pre-determined paths…